Devastated

I am stunned and horrified by the devastation in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. From what it sounds like, the city will be uninhabitable for months if not years, and pretty much everything there will be destroyed or damaged to such a point that it can't be repaired. The only other disater that I can think of that could render an entire city to ruins, and make it impossible to move back due to toxic after-effects would be a nuclear detonation.

In fact, the last time an entire modern city was hit by such a wide-ranging disater on such a large scale was...Hiroshima.

It's just hard ot believe...probably thousands dead, hundreds of thousand of refugees who will never be able to go back home, an entire city destroyed, all that infrastructure, all the historic sites, universities, schools, homes...gone, thousands of businesses...gone. And it is even more heart-breaking that apparently the city had survived the storm proper, only to have the canals breach the following day, when the worst of the danger looked to be over.

This makes 9/11 look like a pin-prick.